Law, Politics and the Gender Binary

The distinction between male and female, or masculinity and femininity, has long been considered as foundational to society and the organization of its institutions. In the last decades, the massive literature on gender has challenged this discursive construction. Gender has been disassembled and reassembled, variously considered as social practice, performance, ideology. Yet, the binary relationship man/woman continues to be a characteristic trait of Western societies. This book gathers together contributions by experts in various fields – including law, sociology, philosophy and anthropology – to pin down the relation between institutions and the gender binary. Centrally, it examines the way in which the present-day gender binary is shored up by the conceptualization and regulation of sex and gender at a societal and institutional level. Based on this examination, it tackles the issue of what the practices and processes of subjectivation are that preserve this binary distinction as the foundation of gender. Each of the chapters discuss this pressing question with a view to considering if current equality policies challenge hierarchical and hegemonic understandings of gender, or if they are the residue of a sexist understanding of gender. This analysis then paves the way for a more general and crucial question: whether institutions can, or should contribute to the process of deconstructing the gender binary.